ot that I am!--I am at your orders, monsieur," he said, making a
sign to the Commissioner to pass out.

He again saluted the stupefied journalist, and the Commissioner bowing
to him, out of politeness or prudence, Guy passed before him, angrily
twirling his mustache.

Besides Brevans, nobody in all that crowd suspected that a man had just
been arrested in the midst of the Exposition. Unless the journalist had
hawked the news from group to group, it would not have been suspected.

Lissac found at the door of the Club on Place Vendome a hired carriage
which had come up as soon as the driver saw the Commissioner. Two
agents, having the appearance of good, peaceable bourgeois, were walking
about, chatting together on the sidewalk, as if on duty. The
Commissioner said to one of them:

"I have no further need of you, Crabot will do."

Crabot, a little man with the profile of a weasel, slowly mounted the
box beside the coachman, and the Commissioner of Police took his seat
next to Lissac, who had nervously plucked the rosette of the Portuguese
Order of Christ from his buttonhole.

"What!" he said. "Really, then, it is for this? Because I wear this
ribbon without having paid five or six louis into the Chancellery?--I
have always intended to do so, but, believe me, I have not had the time.
But a fiscal question does not warrant publicly insulting--"

"I do not know if it is for that," interrupted the Commissioner; "but it
is evident that a recent note in the _Officiel_ points directly to the
illegal wearing of foreign decorations. You do not read the _Officiel_,
Monsieur de Lissac."

Guy shrugged his shoulders as if he considered the matter perfectly
ridiculous. It seemed to him that behind the alleged pretext there was
some secret cause, something like a feminine intrigue. He vaguely
recalled that he had seen Marianne one evening at Madame de Marsy's
smile at the Prefect of Police, that Jouvenet who flirted so agreeably
with that pretty girl in a corner of the salon. And then, too, at the
theatre, in Marianne's box, the prefect found his way. At the first
moment, the idea that Marianne had a hand in this arrest took possession
of his mind. He saw her standing before him at his house, posing her
little nervous, fidgety hand on his breast at the very spot occupied by
this rosette; again he saw her smiling mysteriously, accompanying it
with a caress which seemed to suggest the desire to end in a scratch.

Was it really t